Films from directors Chad Gracia, Ilinca Calugareanu

PARK CITY, UTAH — As the political temperature of East-West relations continues to drop, two new documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival shine a klieg light on the old Cold War, revealing information that isn’t only surprising, but altogether ominous.

The first is the incendiary Russian Woodpecker, a film that opens with mass protests in Ukraine and ends with the strong suggestion the Kremlin blew the Chernobyl reactor to cover-up a botched weapon. The second is Chuck Norris vs. Communism, a much lighter look at how pirated Hollywood movies influenced an entire generation of Romanians and set the stage for rebellion against former leader Nicolae Ceausescu.

Both competing in the World Cinema Documentary program, they prove how little we in the West still understand about the former ‘evil empire’ — despite a quarter century of Glasnost and the sight of Muscovites in Levis.

“On the surface, you know, Russians look similar to Americans in their jeans but the longer you stay the more you realize that they are very, very different people,” says Chad Gracia, the director behind The Russian Woodpecker.

An American theatre director who was working in Kiev on an adaptation of Anna Karenina in 2013, Gracia says he’s never been a conspiracy theorist, or for that matter anti-Russian, but when his Ukrainian production designer, Fedor Alexandrovich, approached him about a “Russian Woodpecker” he was intrigued.

Gracia thought Alexandrovich wanted to take him to a zoo or an aviary, but when he turned to the Internet and researched what his creative collaborator was trying to tell him, he realized it wasn’t a bird, but a mega-antenna that showered North America with low-wave frequencies from July 4, 1976 to 1989.

The signals made a constant tapping noise that befuddled American intelligence, causing the CIA and others to dub it the “Russian Woodpecker.”

The purpose of the antenna was never clear. Some thought it was designed to control weather. Others believed it was a form of mind-control.

Either way, Gracia was curious enough to take a field trip to where civilian radio operators had tracked the signal: In the very shadow of the Chernobyl reactor, where radiation levels are still 10 times normal.

“There was a lot of mystery to it, so I said to Fedor: Let’s make a five minute piece. I’ve never made a movie before. I’ll get a camera, it will be a fun little project and we’ll put it on YouTube.”

But once Gracia started interviewing Russian weapons designers, he sensed something wasn’t quite right: “They fed us so much misinformation, lies and contradictions that by the time we actually got there we knew there was something else behind this antenna.”

What we eventually learn is the antenna, named Duga 3, was one of the most powerful radio antennas in the world, it cost more to build than the neighbouring reactor and most importantly, it didn’t work properly.

It was slated for inspection, but the officials never made it: The reactor blew shortly before they were scheduled to arrive.

“Almost everyone in Ukraine believes Chernobyl was not an accident. Almost everyone believed it was the Americans who blew up Chernobyl. In fact, Fedor thought that might be true,” says Gracia.

The rhetoric surrounding the 1986 disaster was as toxic as the irradiated landscape, but Gracia and Alexandrovich pushed on, interviewing retired officials and digging up new truths until the Ukrainian KGB tried to stop the film in its tracks by telling Alexandrovich his American friend was a CIA spy.

‘When you see Chuck Norris resist authority without fear, it makes you think you can do the same.’

“We started to distrust each other,” says Gracia. “And that’s why the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did. People didn’t trust each other.”

The Kremlin’s concerted effort to instill fear and paranoia in order to control the masses sits at the heart of Gracia’s film, but it’s the weariness of being controlled that sits at the heart of Chuck Norris vs. Communism.

The first documentary feature from Romanian director Ilinca Calugareanu, Chuck Norris vs. Communism takes a look at the effect pirated western movies had on a captive audience behind the Iron Curtain.

Hundreds of films, from Rocky to Last Tango in Paris, circulated through the country via a black market network, opening a window on an entirely different reality.

“These movies gave people hope,” says Calugareanu, sitting in a Park City condo. “When you see Chuck Norris resist authority without fear, it makes you think you can do the same,” she says.

As a result, by the time the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, people were ready to stand up and fight.

That spirit of resistance clearly lives on in former Soviet satellite states, and for Gracia and Alexandrovich, that’s a very good thing: amateur radio operators have been hearing a strange-but-familiar tapping sound recent months. This time it’s coming from a new location, deep in the heart of Russia.